Recent Feature Articles

The More Things Change: Fortran Edition

by snoofle
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-25

Technology improves over time. Storage capacity increases. Spinning platters are replaced with memory chips. CPUs and memory get faster. Moore's Law. Compilers and languages get better. More language features become available. But do these changes actually improve things? Fifty years ago, meteorologists used the best mainframes of the time, and got the weather wrong more than they got it right. Today, they have a global network of satellites and supercomputers, yet they're wrong more than they're right (we just had a snowstorm in NJ that was forecast as 2-4", but got 16" before drifting).

As with most other languages, FORTRAN also added structure, better flow control and so forth. The problem with languages undergoing such a massive improvement is that occasionally, coding styles live for a very long time.

All Saints' Day

by Jane Bailey
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-24

Oh, PHP. It's the butt of any number of jokes in the programming community. Those who do PHP often lie and pretend they don't, just to avoid the social stigma. Today's submitter not only works in PHP, but they also freelance: the bottom of the bottom of the development hierarchy.

Alien Code Reuse

by Remy Porter
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-22

“Probably the best thing to do is try and reorganize the project some,” Tim, “Alien”’s new boss said. “It’s a bit of a mess, so a little refactoring will help you understand how the code all fits together.”

“Alien” grabbed the code from git, and started walking through the code. As promised, it was a bit of a mess, but partially that mess came from their business needs. There was a bunch of common functionality in a Common module, but for each region they did business in- Asia, North America, Europe, etc.- there was a region specific deployable, each in its own module. Each region had its own build target that would include the Common module as part of the build process.

In $BANK We Trust

by snoofle
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-17

During the few months after getting my BS and before starting my MS, I worked for a bank that held lots of securities - and gold - in trust for others. There was a massive vault with multiple layers of steel doors, iron door grates, security access cards, armed guards, and signature comparisons (live vs pre-registered). It was a bit unnerving to get in there, so deep below ground, but once in, it looked very much like the Fort Knox vault scene in Goldfinger.

At that point, PCs weren't yet available to the masses and I had very little exposure to mainframes. I had been hired as an assistant to one of their drones who had been assigned to find all of the paper-driven-changes that had gone awry and get their books up to date.

Why Medical Insurance Is So Expensive

by Ellis Morning
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-16

At the end of 2016, Ian S. accepted a contract position at a large medical conglomerate. He was joining a team of 6 developers on a project to automate what was normally a 10,000-hour manual process of cross-checking spreadsheets and data files. The end result would be a Django server offering a RESTful API and MySQL backend.

Legacy Hardware

by Remy Porter
in Feature Articles
on 2018-01-04

Thanks to Hired, we’ve got the opportunity to bring you another little special project- Legacy Hardware. Hold on tight for a noir-thriller that dares to ask the question: “why does everything in our organization need to talk to an ancient mainframe?” Also, it’s important to note, Larry Ellison really does have a secret lair on a volcanic island in Hawaii.